"Teaching accounting today is a whole new ballgame – the groundrules are new, the equipment is different and even the players have changed," muses Dan Deines, Associate Professor of Accounting at the College of Business of Kansas State University. "We’re preparing students for a new future with new knowledge, skills and approaches to help them hit the ground running. In fact, the profession of the CPA Vision is all that they’ll ever know."

Dr. Deines has been a professor of accounting at Kansas State since 1982. His theory of education takes a practical bent, seeking to meet the real-world needs of students, the profession and the public. That means moving away from training students to become proceduralists and toward preparing them to become thinkers, away from rote memorization of rules and toward applying knowledge thoughtfully and analytically to real-life business problems, while at the same time harnessing the immense power of technology. After all, these are the things that the new marketplace – the marketplace of the CPA Vision – is demanding.

Kansas State, in fact, was one of the first five schools to throw out its entire traditional accounting curriculum. Professor Deines served as co-coordinator for the school’s accounting curriculum revision, sponsored by the Accounting Education Change Commission, a special group funded by several large accounting firms to promote curriculum reform across the country. Starting from square one, it redefined the discipline with a whole new philosophy geared to addressing the profession’s demands. Whereas accounting students traditionally never wrote an essay or worked in groups, for example, today solving unstructured problems, writing reports and developing presentations are key to the learning process. Feedback from firms hiring the resulting new breed of student has been extremely positive. And students have said that they find themselves at a distinct advantage vis-à-vis their colleagues who have gone through the traditional curriculum..

At Kansas State, Professor Deines has been recognized with the College of Business’s Outstanding Educator Award and holds the Ralph Crouch, KPMG Peat Marwick Chair. He has taught accounting there for seventeen years. Outside the classroom, Dr. Deines has spoken on the subject of curriculum restructuring as presenter, panelist or reviewer before numerous professional groups. He also chaired the AICPA’s Accounting Career Subcommittee as well as served on its Accounting Education Executive Committee, has chaired the Kansas Society of CPAs’ Accounting Recruitment and Members in Education Committee and holds certificates in both Kansas and Nebraska. He also is co-author of the seminal textbook Introduction to Accounting: an Integrated Approach.